Sending Out an SOS

One Saturday when I was about 10 years old, my parents set out on a mission: to tell people about Jesus. There were many ways we might have done this, but on this day my parents chose to knock on people’s doors. After several unmemorable stops, we came to one house that I’ll never forget. A man came to the door and my parents kindly explained why we were there. You would have thought that they told him that they wanted to sacrifice him and his family to the devil! He screamed and cursed at us and told us that he was going to shoot us if we weren’t off his property by the time he returned with his gun. As we ran as fast as we could to the safety of our car, you can imagine how scared I was. That was the last time our family did that.

So with that in my background, why would I have the gall to ask you to knock on doors this Saturday? Let me give you a couple reasons:

First, because while our goal is the same, what we’re doing on Saturday is very different than what we were doing on that Saturday 25 years ago. This Saturday we hope to disarm our neighbors by loving and serving them instead of simply “trying to sell them something”. It’s the old adage: “They won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. If we can show that we care, they might care when we point them to the One who cares for them more than they ever could have possibly imagined.

Second, Scripture says things like “Everyone who wants to live a godly life will be persecuted” (2 Tim 3:12) and “In this world you will have trouble…” (John 16:33) When was the last time you had “trouble” on account of Jesus? We need to take more risks in order that people might find Jesus. Because the bottom line is this: People are dying all around us, but we have the cure! We really do.

So for the sake of our neighbors, let’s be proactive, intentional, and sometimes even bold! If you knew that you had a hand in bringing just one neighbor to Jesus, wouldn’t it be well worth it?